


The Skywalker Record: A Detailed Scholarly Analysis, by Chirrut Îmwe

by Anonymous



Category: House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - House of Leaves Fusion, Horror, Minor Armitage Hux/Rose Tico, Minor Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker, Minor Poe Dameron/Finn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-03-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:08:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22990735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: The first shot ofThe Skywalker Recordthat was discovered on YouTube - a thirty second clip - initially appears to be of an abandoned office. The camera slowly pans across the large room, which has yellowing paneled walls and low-quality yellow carpet that the watcher can almost smell, even in the flickering fluorescent lights. As the camera moves into the next room, and the next, it slowly dawns on the watcher that this is no ordinary office park. At second 27 the camera turns a corner, and we are presented with a corridor, an unending hallway of yellow walls and yellow carpet and flickering fluorescent lights that seems to go on forever. The person behind the camera says what the watcher assumes to be the wordfuck, although the clip cuts out before the final explosive.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey
Comments: 12
Kudos: 16
Collections: Anonymous, Reylo After Dark





	The Skywalker Record: A Detailed Scholarly Analysis, by Chirrut Îmwe

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Birthday, _House of Leaves_.

The first shot of _The Skywalker Record_ that was discovered on YouTube - a thirty second clip - initially appears to be of an abandoned office.1 The camera slowly pans across the large room, which has yellowing paneled walls and low-quality yellow carpet that the watcher can almost smell, even in the flickering fluorescent lights. As the camera moves into the next room, and the next, it slowly dawns on the watcher that this is no ordinary office park. At second 27 the camera turns a corner, and we are presented with a corridor, an unending hallway of yellow walls and yellow carpet and flickering fluorescent lights that seems to go on forever. The person behind the camera says what the watcher assumes to be the word _fuck_ , although the clip cuts out before the final explosive.

As additional clips came to light over the next several months the story behind the yellow place slowly comes into focus. We are first introduced to the titular family, a seemingly normal crew. There is paterfamilias Anakin Skywalker, a military vet scarred from his service, and his wife, Padme Amidala, an attorney with political ambitions who chooses to follow her husband's dream instead of her own. Their child twins, the dark haired Leia and towheaded Luke, are as alike as night and day but connected by a Force as touching as it can be eerie. And finally the audience favorite, not family however one might say _found family_ … but ah, if you have seen the film you know who I am talking about, and if you haven't I don't want to give away everything in the first page of my book, do I.

The real star of the film, as we all know, is the house. At first it seems to be a relatively normal house, unusual perhaps only for its location - set back in the woods in a district not identified in the context of the film, although current scholarly consensus is that it lies in the Pacific Northwest, possibly not far from Seattle, Washington2 \- and for its sad state of disrepair. Padme Amidala describes it in a rare moment of candor when she is alone with the camera.3 In this clip she sits in the bedroom closet, dark except for the blue glow of her laptop screen which illuminates both her body and the unworn clothes from her former workplace that hang around her. She begins speaking with her face in her hands, which muffles her voice slightly although it is still legible.

"It's a mess, such a mess. I told Ani yesterday, this is what you get when you buy a house sight unseen. And it’s not as though the photos were misleading, we knew it was going to be bad, but… the mold in the living room wall, it _smells_ , and there are vines growing up the North side of the house that I don’t remember seeing in any photos."

At this point Padme lifts her chin, and by the time she’s facing the camera she sounds more like her usual self. She looks into the camera, and not at herself on the screen, a personal preference that the watcher will note throughout the clips.

“I don't mean to say there's nothing good. The layout of the house is nice, even though there are only two bedrooms there's plenty of space for all of us, with the rec room in the basement and the huge living room. The children love the balcony. And the woods are beautiful, although I do sometimes wish we were closer to the city. But Ani loves it here, and everything is fixable, we can fix it. It’ll be fine. I know it will be fine."

At this point a small voice pipes up offscreen, saying something about "Edmund", and the camera cuts off immediately.

The house is the star. But what do we know about the house? Only what we see and hear in the film clips. The house is three stories tall, in an “L" shape built into a wooded hillside. The layout of the home will become clear in later chapters, although we can say that it has two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a basement recreation room, a high-ceilinged living room with a balcony, a kitchen, and an office/den. There is also a two-car garage; it is the only room in the house that has never been discovered in a film clip although scholarly consensus is that more clips may yet survive.4

The style is vaguely Tudor, with grey stone siding along the bottom half of the house and timber planking filled with stucco on the top half, although the house itself is not very old, perhaps built in the late 1960s or early 1970s. As implied by Padme Amidala in the film clip quoted above, the house is in serious need of work. There is what appears to be severe water damage on the lower level, warped doorways and windows throughout the house, and the aforementioned mold stain on the wall of the main room. And then, of course, there are the doors. But very little can be done about them.

The condition of the house and its changes over time, and the relative deterioration of the Skywalker family, are very helpful for determining the chronological ordering of the clips - one of the main objects of this current project.

The other main aspiration of this project is to examine the film, partially and as a whole, through a variety of narrative frames. These frames, like different frames on the same portrait, can help the watcher consider the story being told from many different angles. 

In chapter one, we introduce the house and the family through the frame of the **uncanny valley** \- a frame that will be a constant thread through the rest of the analysis. Well known through the popular imagination, the uncanny valley was described by Masahiro Mori in a 1970 article in the Japanese journal _Energy_ , which wasn't translated into English completely until 2012.5 In this article, Mori discusses how he envisions people responding to robots as they become more like humans. Mori’s proposition is that, as robots become more human-like, we have greater affinity for them, until they reach a point at which the likeness becomes creepy, or _uncanny_ , leading to a sudden dip into negative affinity – the _uncanny valley_. I make a similar argument about both the house and the family through the course of this book. The house exists in reality, as humans do in Mori's conception, but a virtual version of the house exists in the film clips. Likewise the family. As the film begins, what does this virtualization of them all mean for the watcher? How real are they? As the film continues, and the filmed become more and more real, we must ask: at what point, if ever, will they reach the uncanny valley? Will they move beyond it?

In chapter two we get to know the family better, and see cracks forming in their relationships as the house itself begins to be fixed. We see this happen through the frame of **the Ghost in the Machine** , which was a term coined by philosopher Gordon Ryle in 1949 to describe the concept of mind-body dualism, that is, that the human mind and the body are distinct and separable.6 Are the various family members distinct from each other? Are the doors distinct from the rest of the house? Where does the house end and the family begin? Or vice versa?

In chapter three we discuss the doors - what they are, what they do, where they lead, what they might mean. The frame for this discussion is **Narnia** , the fictional world created by British lay theologian Clive Staples Lewis in his series of children’s books _The Chronicles of Narnia_.7 Both Narnia and the doors represent liminal spaces - transitions from one place or state of mind to another, boundaries placed around a person or a place that are then breached. It is notable that the Skywalker children are seen reading and referencing the Narnia books in many of the clips. What do secret worlds mean to the family? What do they mean to the house?

Chapter four moves beyond the doors, through the liminal spaces into the first glimpses of the yellow place. For this chapter we use the frame of the **cyborg** , short for "cybernetic organism". The term was coined in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline to describe a being with both organic and biomechatronic body parts.8 The house does not extend itself with machine parts, but nevertheless we may find it useful to examine its extensions - its Narnia, if you will - alongside Donna Haraway’s _The Cyborg Manifesto_.9 As the house extends and expands, likewise the Skywalker family expands in unexpected ways.

Chapter five takes us further into the guts of the house, on the final journey into the yellow place, and for this discussion there is no better frame than **Frankenstein**. _Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus_ is a novel written by English author Mary Shelley (1797–1851) that tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a hideous sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment.10 The creature, however, is intelligent and creative, and longs for acceptance and to be loved. What kind of creature is the house? What are its needs, its desires? And what of the Skywalker family? Who is the real monster? These issues will be addressed in this chapter.

Finally, we reach the end of the story and examine the fallout of the final journey through the frame of the **palimpsest**. A palimpsest is a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain, although the term can also be used more generally to refer to something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form. How have the events of the story changed the house? How have they changed the Skywalker family? What has been overwritten, what will never be erased? Chapter six will seek to acknowledge these questions and more.

By organizing the film clips into roughly chronological order we can determine a larger story: a story of family, of love and loss, and a story of the unknown and our fear of it. In this book I will add my own voice to the narrative, presenting my proposed ordering of the clips and examining the story through the different narrative frames described above. In this way I hope to provide the definitive explanation and critique of the collection of film clips commonly referred to as _The Skywalker Record_.

I am very pleased that you’re here to go on this adventure with me.

Sincerely,

Chirrut Îmwe  
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

* * *

**Introduction Notes**

[1] _The Skywalker Record_ Clip 42 (Îmwe numbering here and throughout) <https://youtu.be/nJRJjxZm41o>

[2] Melville, Charles. “The Location of The House On Mustafar Lane: A Definitive Consensus?" _Journal de la société pour l'étude des rues sauvages_ , vol. 9, no. 11, 1999, pp. 9-11. The reader will note that one of the odd things about the field of _The Skywalker Record_ research is that there is substantial scholarship from before the film clips were widely accessible, in some cases seemingly before the film itself could have existed (although the dating of the film is itself a question, this book will not seek to address it, preferring instead to point to the body of work already published on the matter). One learns quickly to suspend disbelief; this is simply the way of the field. (For a discussion on the dating of the film clips, see Reston, William, "'Today, tomorrow, next week, last year': Dating _The Skywalker Record_." _Consciousness and Cognition_ , vol. 11, no. 1, March 2002, pp. 78-97.)

[3] _Skywalker Record_ Clip 9 <https://youtu.be/YOCEHKSgwlQ>

[4] Reston, William, “A Tentative Ordering and Proposed Missing Clips of _The Skywalker Record_." _Film Quarterly_ , vol. 71, no. 3, Spring 2018, pp. 21-26.

[5] Mori, Masahiro. “The uncanny valley." _Energy_ , vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 33–35, 1970 (in Japanese); Mori, Masahiro, MacDorman, K. F. and Kageki, N. “The Uncanny Valley [From the Field]." _IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine_, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 98-100, June 2012. (translated into English) (<https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6213238/>)

[6] Ryle, Gilbert. _The Concept of Mind_. University of Chicago Press, 1949.

[7] Lewis, C. S. _The Chronicles of Narnia_. Geoffrey Bles and The Bodley Head, 1950-1956.

[8] Clynes, Manfred and Kline, Nathan. “Cyborgs and Space." _Astronautics_ , September 1960, pp. 26-76.

[9] Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." _Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature_. Routledge, 1990, pp. 149–181.

[10] Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. _Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus_. London, Colburn & Bentley, 1831.

**Author's Note:**

> In progress. Subscribe if you want to know what happens next, and what on earth Kylo and Rey have to do with it.


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